In the wake of the Bridgegate fiasco, the Port Authority had its own oversight committee examine potential operational reforms in response to what was, if nothing else, an egregious abuse of power.

We still don’t entirely know who knew what and when regarding last year’s lane closures at the George Washington Bridge believed motivated by some form of political retribution. What we do know is that the scandal further exposed the dysfunction within the Port Authority fueled in significant part by turf wars among the dueling appointees from both sides of the Hudson River.

As the oversight committee began doing its work, one of the key reforms discussed during a public hearing was the need to reduce governors’ influence over the agency, which has become a patronage dumping pit.

Govs. Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo of New York apparently weren’t happy about that. Within a couple of weeks of that April 21 hearing, Christie and Cuomo had announced the formation of their own special governors’ panel to perform their own investigation and develop their own reforms. In announcing the new panel and its marching orders, nowhere was it mentioned that the possibility of curbing gubernatorial control would be among the considerations.

It should surprise no one that the work of the governors’ panel is now taking precedence over the authority’s own oversight committee. A recent meeting of the oversight group was cancelled, with the explanation that the group is instead focusing on working with — or rather, for — the governors’ panel.

Christie is used to these sorts of tactical maneuvers. Don’t forget the bogus internal investigation he ordered regarding any staff involvement in Bridgegate, a ploy designed to “clear” him of any wrongdoing, despite any number of flaws and deficiencies in the report. So here we go again, with one oversight panel set up to derail another, and to scuttle anything that the first committee might suggest that could jeopardize any power at the agency now enjoyed by Christie and Cuomo.

Christie isn’t the first governor to exploit the Port Authority for his own purposes, but he has pushed the patronage envelope more than most, dumping unqualified cronies into Port Authority jobs, and empowering the likes of former Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni and former holder-of-invented-powerful-sounding-title David Wildstein to do his bidding.

Wildstein is widely viewed as the person who ordered the lane closures, partly at the behest of Christie’s deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly. Baroni’s claim to shame is the ridiculously concocted tales of a traffic study that supposedly prompted the closures, a story he spun in front of an Assembly committee hearing.

All of this is part of the larger problem of partisan infighting across the Hudson River as New York and New Jersey each angle for bigger slices of the Port Authority pie. To accomplish that goal, governors appoint officers and commissioners they can control and fill the authority ranks with their own people.

The public cannot be expected to trust a panel specifically created by the governors to take an honest look at whether those same governors have too much agency power. That’s a recipe for failure.